Saturday, January 19, 2013

From ‘Authentic Happiness’ by Martin E P Seligman

The “pleasant life” might be had by drinking champagne and
driving a Porche, but not the good life. Rather, the good life is using your
signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant
gratification

…..research from the University of Minnesota shows that
there is a personality trait of good cheer and bubbliness…..which, it turns
out, is highly heritable.

…..happy people have more casual friends and more close
friends, are more likely to be married and are more involved in group
activities than unhappy people

…..roughly 50 percent of almost every personality trait
turns out to be attributable to genetic inheritance. But highly heritable
traits (like sexual orientation and body weight) don’t change much at all,
while other highly heritable traits (like pessimism and fearfulness) are very
changeable.

After three years of study, the novice monk arrives at the
dwelling of his teacher. He enters the room, bursting with ideas about knotty
issues of Buddhist metaphysics, and well-prepared for the deep questions that
await him in his examination.

“I have but one question,” his teacher intones.

“I am ready, master,” he replies.

“In the doorway, were the flowers to the left or to the
right of the umbrella?”

The novice retires, abashed, for three more years of study.

Mounting over the last forty years in every wealthy country
on the globe, there has beena startling increase in depression. Depression is
now ten times as prevalent as it was in 1960, and it strikes at a much younger
age. …. I have theorized that an ethos that builds unwarranted self-esteem,
espouses victimology, and encourages rampant individualism has contributed to
this epidemic …..There is another factor… the over-reliance on shortcuts to
happiness. Every wealthy nation creates more and more shortcuts to pleasure:
television, drugs, shopping, loveless sex, spectator sports, and chocolate to
name a few. ….

To start the process of eschewing easy pleasures and
engaging in more gratifications is hard. The gratifications produce flow, but
they require skill and effort….they offer the possibility of failing….. Playing
three sets of tennis, or participating in a clever conversation, or reading
Richard Russo takes work – at least to start. The pleasures do not: watching a
sitcom, masturbating, and inhaling perfume are not challenging. Eating a
buttered bagel or viewing televised football on Monday night requires no effort
and little skill, and there is no possibility of failure. …..

A mountain climber may be close to freezing, utterly
exhausted, in danger of falling into a bottomless crevasse, yet he wouldn’t
want to be anywhere else. Sipping a cocktail under a palm tree at the edge of
the turquoise ocean is nice, but it just doesn’t compare to the exhilaration he
feels on that freezing edge.

…..beyond the safety net, more money adds little or nothing
to subjective well-being….. While real income in America has risen 16 percent
in the last thirty years, the percentage of people who describe themselves as
“very happy” has fallen from 36 to 29 percent.

Identify your signature
strengths

Choose work that lets you
use them every day.

Cindy Hazan, a Cornell psychologist, tells us that there are
three kinds of love. First is love of the people who give us comfort,
acceptance, and help, who bolster our confidence and guide us. The prototype is
children’s love of their parents. Second, we love the people who depend on us
for these provisions; the prototype of this is parents’ love for their children.
Finally comes romantic love – the idealization of another, idealizing their
strengths and virtues and downplaying their shortcomings. Marriage is unique as
the arrangement that gives us all three kinds of love under the same umbrella,
and it is this property that makes marriage so successful………

Evolution has a very strong interest in reproductive
success, and thus in the institution of marriage. Successful reproduction in
our species is not a matter of quick fertilization, with both partners then
going their own separate ways: rather, humans are born big-brained and
immature, a state that necessitates a vast amount of learning from parents.
This advantage only works with the addition of pair-bonding. Immature,
dependent offspring who have parents that stick around to protect and mentor
them do much better than their cousins whose parents abandoned them. Those of
our ancestors, therefore, who were inclined to make a deep commitment to each
other were more likely to have viable children and thereby pass on their genes.
Thus marriage was “invented” by natural selection, not by culture.

….Woman who have stable sexual relationships ovulate more
regularly, and they continue ovulating into middle age, reaching menopause
later than women in unstable relations. The children of couples who are married
and stay married do better by every known criterion than the children of all
other arragements. For example, children who live with both biological parents
are treated for emotional disorders at one-fourth to one-third the rate of the
other parenting arrangements. Among the most surprising outcomes … are the
findings that the children of stable marriages mature more slowly in sexual
terms, they have more positive attitudes toward potential mates, and are more
interested in long-term relationships than are children of divorce.

The overarching principle of good listening is validation. The speaker first wants to
know that he has been understood …. If possible, he additionally wants to know
that the listener agrees or is at least sympathetic….. The most superficial problem of
nonresponsive listening is simple inattention. External factors – kids crying,
deafness, a TV set on in the background, static on the phone – should be
eliminated. Avoid conversation under these circumstances ….. Preparing your
rebuttal while listening is an insidious habit

….Robert Wright’s book,……. The universal picture of political change over the centuries, all
across the world, is from savage to barbarian to civilization. There is a
progression with an increase in win-win situations at its core. The more
positive-sum games in a culture, the more likely it is to survive and
flourish…… history is checkered with one horror after another …..But the broad
movement of human history ….. is, when viewed over centuries, in the direction
of more win-win.